“Other girls’ attitudes [make it hard for me],” she said. At that moment, we could hear other inmates banging on their cell doors. The clanks and bangs echoed loudly through the unit.
“Like that,” she continued, referencing the banging. “Everybody’s different. I mean, you’re put in a place with a bunch of girls you don’t know and it’s hard for you guys to all fit together without wanting to kill each other . . . so I mean, like me, if I’m feeling sad, I hide my feelings. I cover it by being goofy. I do that to the other girls to make them laugh, but they’re not used to how my personality is, so then they get upset about it. But then I have to tell them, ‘I’m not doing it to make you mad. This is the way I am.’ And they be like, ‘Okay’ . . . and then they get used to it. Like one of the girls, she reminds me so much of my sister . . . She talks back to me on purpose, [and] that’s just our relationship. I call her by my little sister’s name, so it’s like, that’s just me and her . . . So we could be in class and just talk to each other like, acting like we’re having an argument. And the teacher think we’re having an argument, but we’re laughing at each other.”
In my experience, children in carceral settings will create family structures in order to normalize what can be an otherwise dehumanizing experience. Youth who are peers in age might appropriate a family structure by calling another inmate their “mother” or “sister” to help normalize the living space and to provide familial supports for each other that may not otherwise exist. When teachers are not aware of these relationships, or when they respond to them with discipline, they undermine these relationships and instead perpetrate a hyperpunitive learning environment. A more productive and effective approach might be to facilitate collaborative learning spaces where girls are encouraged to explore their relationships with each other along with why they reenact “arguments” as a way to demonstrate familial bonds.
Like Black girls who are high achievers, many of those in trouble with the law understand the value of a quality education, even if it has never been offered to them. In my conversations with detained Black girls, they understood that education was an important part of their time in juvenile hall. However, most did not consider their juvenile court school to be a model learning environment. In general, they agreed with youth nationwide who view the quality of correctional education as “poor,” inadequate by state standards.36
As described in earlier chapters, schools’ punitive response to girls’ truancy, experience with bullying, and learning disabilities reinforces relationships that further marginalize girls who are struggling to survive. For girls who live in poverty and who have a history of contact with the criminal legal system, schools reproduce dominant ideas of power and privilege in ways that push them away from school and toward other environments that increase their risk of confinement. Historically, this vulnerability is further increased when teachers, administrators, and institutional policies project low expectations onto Black girls who have been labeled as delinquent.37 Notwithstanding their status as “juvenile delinquents” with significant histories of victimization, these girls know that an education is their best chance for a good job—that it is their “passport to the future,” as Malcolm X stated.38
Girls in confinement know that the juvenile court school provides a special opportunity to reconnect them with school. Still, too often the poor quality of instruction, combined with racial isolation, a punitive climate, and an inability to successfully match their district school credit with the credits they earned while in detention, has left them at a loss and further pushed out of school. These tangible, symbolic, verbal, and nonverbal cues communicate just how tenuous their rehabilitative status really is. For some girls—like Mia in the Bay Area, who found her family’s conflicting messages about how she should behave in school confusing—all they have to rely on is self-motivation to attend school and perform well; being treated as expendable serves to reinforce her understanding of education as an optional activity, and school as a place that she could (and in her mind perhaps should) live without.
The majority of the girls I have spoken with over the years have reported a lack of confidence in the teaching ability and/or commitment of at least one instructor in their juvenile court school. Almost half of them have perceived that a teacher in their juvenile court school had routinely refused to answer their specific questions about the material they were learning.
When girls have not been actively in school prior to their incarceration, they express concern about the perceived skill set of their instructor having an impact on their future. As Janis once said to me, “I don’t even know my credits. They [juvenile court school] don’t be helping me out with nothing. . . . I know I really want to go to college, though. But I don’t want to go far, because I don’t want to be away from home. Like, I get homesick.”
Janis was another runner. She ran away from home and group homes and even cut off her electronic ankle monitor because it made her feel enslaved. So, I found her statement about being “homesick” very interesting.
“You run away, but you get homesick?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Janis said. “I really get homesick. . . . I don’t know. . . .”
She chuckled and then continued, “I just get homesick. I don’t want to go far, but . . . I want to have a good education. I know for sure I’m going to go to college for four years.”
Her statement piqued my interest. Detained African American girls have been found to express a desire to continue their education after their period of incarceration.39 Previous research also found that while detained Black girls often have experienced depression and trauma, they demonstrate more self-efficacy and lower levels of delinquency than their male counterparts—all of which has an impact on whether Janis’s interest in going to college actually materializes. To this point, Bonita Veysey wrote:
Girls with histories of physical and sexual abuse are extremely vulnerable to trauma reactions, and typical justice and treatment procedures, such as a pat down by a male officer, can be re-traumatizing and trigger trauma responses. . . . Girls who meet the criteria for conduct disorder, for example, have a higher risk than their male counterparts for developing more severe psychopathology. . . . Similarly, the long-term prognosis for girls with antisocial behavior who fail to receive treatment is dismal. For example, more than half of the girls committed to state training schools reported attempting suicide, and of these, 64 percent had attempted more than once.40
Research has also found that having greater levels of family and community involvement may increase student academic potential.41 Allowing girls to explore their experiences and conditions in the context of their learning environment would give them space to reconsider the value of education. What these young women learn and whom they are learning with, therefore, are just as important as the fact that they are learning.
“Do you know what you want to study in college? Do you know what interests you?” I asked Janis.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Have you ever talked to a counselor . . . like a college placement counselor or anything . . . who could help talk to you about how to get to a community college or get you on the road to a four year college?”
Janis shook her head. “No.”
Though there are concerns about the low success rate of students who enter college without the necessary pathways to success, when students have a team of stakeholders invested in their academic success and financial stability while in school, they perform well. Janis was full of youthful exuberance (and a fair amount of rebellion), but she was clueless about her own educational trajectory. I looked at her and asked, “How do you think schools could better prepare you to get to college?”
She sat back in her chair and thought about my question for a few seconds.
“They need to tell you your credits,” she finally responded, focusing specifically on the juvenile court school. “How much you need [and] what you need. Like, you know how some colleges are like, you got
to have this together, or you got to have this grade point average . . . they could help us out with that. Or tell us, ‘If you want to go here, you got to go do this,’ you know, like . . . we need to learn stuff. I don’t want to go to college and just be dumb, thinking I’ve been learning all this time, and I’ve been learning Little League stuff, you know?” Janis was searching for a pathway from confinement to college.
The punitive learning environment that many Black girls experience in their district schools is often exacerbated in their juvenile court school. The girls who spoke with me were removed from the classroom, suspended, or subjected to a written reprimand for acts of insubordination (“talking back” or refusing to read a book) or for acts that signaled a mismatch between their skill set and the material being taught, such as completing work early or persistently trying to ask a question about the material. Being excluded from their learning environment for asking questions or challenging authority—rather than for posing an actual physical threat to their own safety or to the safety of other students—further criminalizes Black girls in their learning spaces. Worse, it fuels them being disproportionately labeled as “defiant,” “disruptive,” and “uncooperative,” all of which may result in a written reprimand that can lead to more severe sanctions in the hall, including solitary “room time” or loss of recreation privileges. The exclusionary discipline that is often indirectly related to school pushout becomes more direct and pronounced in juvenile court schools.
“We’re Inmates, but We’re Still Kids”
Jennifer had been sex-trafficked, and her sexual victimization and three-year absence from school facilitated an academic lag. Her relationship with educational institutions needed a lot of nurturing. The juvenile court school was the location inside juvenile hall with the most potential to begin this repair. This was particularly important in light of how Jennifer envisioned her future.
“I care about kids,” she said. “[When I get older] I want to, like, teach somebody instead of locking them up. ’Cause I feel . . . I mean, we’re inmates, but we’re still kids. You know, a lot of these kids in here go through a lot of stuff.”
Jennifer understood the key role of teachers and wanted to present a different environment for young women who were “going through a lot of stuff.” Her persistent frown suggested that she had firsthand knowledge of the ways in which girls were routinely subjected to dehumanizing treatment, both in and out of the classroom. One morning when I was waiting outside of the classroom before a meeting, an institutional staff person walked past me with Jennifer in tow. She had been called out of class for a court appearance, and the staff person had to pause to speak with another staff member. Jennifer’s expression and body language were meek, but the staff person leading her had a different tone.
“Sit your ass down,” the staff person said, pointing to a seat in the general meeting area.
Without a word, Jennifer sat down. She knew how to take orders. Her knees were pressed together as she sat with perfect posture, her hands clasped and resting in her lap. At first, she avoided eye contact with me, but she must have felt my gaze, because she finally looked up.
We had spoken a few days prior about the ways in which those who were supposed to protect her had triggered her, and I wondered why this staff person felt it necessary to bark “sit your ass down” instead of saying “take a seat” or something more appropriate.
“Are you okay?” I quickly mouthed.
She nodded and smiled as if there was nothing wrong. I did not plan to intervene, nor did I have the authority to do so, but I was curious about why this staff member would speak to her this way. I nodded back to her and looked down at my notepad.
Juvenile detention centers are not trauma-sensitive, I thought. And they never will be.
“The teachers’ attitudes [could be better in here],” Jennifer had said when we spoke. “They [could] explain stuff to us and not get irritated so bad. Not all of them, but some of the teachers think, like, ’cause we’re inmates, like, if we say one little thing wrong, they’re going to send us to our room or something. Like, it’s just . . . ’cause we’re inmates, they feel like they have power because they’re outsiders. That’s the problem. If they weren’t so mean like that, it would be better . . . make [girls] care more about their education.
“I think they should have a thing, a program about why education is important,” Jennifer continued. “You have to go through a process to get what you want. . . . When you’re home-schooled, it’s more better. When I’m in the classroom, I can’t do my work because I get nervous. . . . It’s just that I don’t like to be around a lot of people. Plus in here, they be arguing over the dumbest stuff ever, like who sit by who, or . . . I look better than you . . . but you in the same suit, so . . . I can’t be in no classroom with a boy. You know how little boys make dumb remarks? I’ll get irritated really fast.”
I asked if Jennifer preferred the same-gender learning environment that she had while in juvenile hall to the coed classrooms of her district school.
“No, not really,” she said. “I like my own environment.”
For Deja, integration into the juvenile court classroom was less bumpy. She saw it as an important part of her daily routine. At the time of our conversation, she had been in detention for a week and was feeling acclimated to her new learning environment.
“Okay,” Deja said. “About seven, you wake up, get ready to come out and eat. You go back in your room for about another ten or twenty minutes, then walk over here to school. You go to that first class for about, like, two hours [and then] come back for a break for like, thirty minutes . . . we might go to PE or to the library after that. Maybe, if it’s our day. And then go to the other class for two hours. Then, go eat lunch, come back and go to this one last class. Then, we go back over [to the unit] and then it’s shift change, which means we get different staff. So then, we come out and we go work out for like, an hour, thirty minutes or whatever. We eat dinner. Take showers. Then we have an hour rec or whatever . . . you know, they might have a program set up for us. You know, volunteers come up or whatever. Weekends are different. We wake, we eat, clean our rooms, and then like, the staff might have a movie for us.”
When I asked her what she thought of school in juvenile hall, she responded, “Well, I like that one teacher, she does take her time and listen. She’s really helpful and like, she . . . explains and she goes into more details, versus that other teacher where she just . . . I don’t know what’s her problem. . . . She just crazy or something.”
“How does she act?” I asked, noting that she positively responded to the teacher who she said “took her time and listened.”
“If you’re asking her too many questions or something like, if you keep asking her for help or something, she’ll get mad. She’ll make up a little thing, make a big deal out of it, and then try to write you up.”
“So do you ask questions when you actually need help?” I asked. “Or do you ask questions just because you want to know more?”
“I don’t like to be bothered . . . I really don’t. I ask questions when I really don’t understand something. Like, I really just try to do it myself before I ask somebody else for help, and then later on do it to see if I got it wrong. . . . It would be better if [the teacher] were to help sometimes. She don’t want to help. She just want to give you work and expect you to know how to do it.”
Again, the inability for girls to ask questions—clarifying or otherwise—was perceived as a problem by multiple girls getting their education in juvenile hall. Credit recovery was also a hurdle for Deja to overcome.
“Like, every fifteen days, you only get one credit,” she said. “I almost didn’t pass the eleventh grade, ’cause I was just so far behind. [The juvenile court school] needs to fix their school system or something to make it like regular school because . . . you have this school and then when you go back to regular school, [it’s hard]. . . . If I were going to [another] school, it would have been har
der for me to get all back my credits ’cause I was just so far back. I almost had to take night classes and everything. . . . I’m missing something [in here]! Like, I feel like [this school] just [takes] a lot from me . . . it wasn’t even worth doing the work.”
Stacy had a more intimate relationship with school discipline. As a self-described “problem child,” she often responded to authority in a very negative manner. Specifically, she often called people at school “bitches”—teachers, students, and security guards.
“Why would you call the security guard a bitch?” I asked.
“I had a pass to go to the bathroom . . . She [stopped me and was] going to take my pass . . . and then she took my pass! I looked at her . . . and said, ‘That’s hella irritating.’ Then she went to my class, so I was like, ‘Bitch, you’re hella irritating.’ She [said], “You going to make me lose my job.” I was like, ‘Okay, we can just fight ’cause you seem like you threatenin’ me, talking about “you going to make me lose my job.” I got a mama that will beat your ass’ . . . I’m like, yeah . . . so she [took] me to the office. And then when we get to the office, she [said] that she didn’t say that I was going to make her lose her job. I was like, ‘Why is you lying, ’cause the principal right here?’ . . . I will tell them what I said . . . I’ma admit to what I said. Ain’t no reason for me to lie. I’m like, ‘Why you can’t admit to what you said?’”
I looked at Stacy as she cocked her head to the side, folded her arms, and slumped into her chair.
“She know I don’t take smack from nobody,” Stacy said, still visibly irritated by that experience.
Remember: hurt people hurt other people.
These girls’ stories remind us that a classroom inside of a locked facility is not exempt from being a location for the use (or abuse) of suspension and other disciplinary actions that remove children from their learning environment. We are also reminded that for girls accustomed to using violence as a response to feeling disrespected, being in a hyperpunitive environment may only reinforce negative behaviors that result in marginalization from schools. For confined Black girls, the juvenile court school can further alienate them from their education, sometimes for the most minor “infraction,” such as asking a question or making a comment to themselves. The problem is that this hyperpunitive classroom management structure affects girls’ perceptions about the function of school and their relationship with it. This practice may trigger girls who are in trouble with the law and who are already marginalized from school in any setting. The structure fails to meet girls where they are and guide them through their problems, which in all likelihood leads to exacerbated challenges on the other end instead of leading them down healthier, safer paths.
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